For everyone who's been following along with Seth and Allison's kitchen renovation, last week was an exciting week, as we unveiled their beautiful, spacious new kitchen. This week, we're digging a little deeper into the project's budget, comparing the final numbers with Seth and Allison's projections. What cost less than they thought it would? What cost more? Find out below.

From Seth:

Because this kitchen/family room renovation was done simultaneously with a gut renovation of a 2,000 square foot house, our initial Renovation Diary budget post included a lot of costs that actually ended up having little to do directly with work on the kitchen/family room. That’s because prior to the work being done, most services and materials were difficult to break down space by space. Now that the renovation is complete, however, we’ve gone through and itemized as best we can to reflect only costs for the parts of the renovation that have been documented in the Apartment Therapy Renovation Diary.

We weren’t surprised by much with this part of the renovation, since our plan was always to take everything down to the studs and replace all plumbing and electrical. We did encounter a hurdle when we pulled up the existing kitchen floor and found that most of the existing floor joists were notched way beyond what we felt was safe. So we had to pay our contractor an extra half day to re-support all of the joists and replace the subfloor of the entire kitchen area. In the grand scheme, it was a minor hurdle, but definitely unexpected nonetheless.

Also, as you can see, the only place where the actual budget surpassed the projected budget was with appliances. We’d bought a haul of appliances (including a Viking cooktop/hood, dual wall ovens, a refrigerator and a dishwasher) in a bundle for $1,500 off Craigslist because some guy wanted to get rid of it all to do a fresh remodel of his own. Some of those pieces ended up not being up to standards, but at $1,500 what we ended up keeping (including the six-burner Viking cooktop, for sure) was still a good bargain. We did, however, end up going out and buying a refrigerator and dishwasher brand new.

Actual:• Since we replaced our entire heating system I will just allocate 25% of the costs toward the kitchen/family room. (There isn't really any good way to allocate this expense as part of our kitchen remodel.) $1000

Actual:• These items were actually unrelated to the specific kitchen/family room space.

Projected Total (kitchen and rest of house): $1500

Actual Total for Kitchen Only: $0

Difference: -$1500

Actual Total for Kitchen Only:

$41,960

Readers, Check out the full series to see the whole renovation process, step-by-step. And tune in next week for Seth and Allison's final thoughts on their renovation.

The Renovation Diaries are a new collaboration with our community in which we feature your step by step renovation progress and provide monetary support towards getting it done in style. See all of our Reno Diaries here.